Nicola
A year passes both slowly and quickly, the way some years do. In that year, moves to Narragansett, turns thirty, joins
Tinder, unjoins Tinder, joins again. Her mom buys a new car and gifts her her old Subaru. No more cycling! She lives in an
apartment just one step above undergrad housing with two roommates that she found online—a boy named Travis, who is loud and
drinks too much but is fairly tidy, and a girl named Maeve, who is quiet but leaves her socks in the living room and her bras
in the corner of the bathroom. Also, she never unloads the dishwasher. Travis is a bartender at The Tavern, and Maeve is a
graduate student in health care management at URI.
gets two jobs. The first is part-time, at the Save the Bay Exploration Center and Aquarium in Newport, where she doesn’t
make nearly enough to live on but is able to continue the same sort of work she did at BIMI. The second is at the storied
Coast Guard House, where she works two dinner shifts a week and brunch every other Sunday. This is where the real money is,
and this is where the view is too; she loves the way if you look from a certain angle out the windows that line the far edge
of the dining room you can’t see the rocks below and therefore you feel like you’re on a ship.
Travis is never home at night and Maeve is never home in the daytime, which means that , with her irregular day-and-night schedule, is almost never alone in the house. This is mostly fine, but sometimes she longs for the relative solitude of her cottage off Corn Neck Road. What she doesn’t long for is the chaos that swirled around it—that swirled around that whole island.
Sometimes she even misses the uphill, bumpy bike ride to get to Taylor and David’s house.
The nine months she lives in Narragansett, she spends a lot of time near the water. On the mild days, of which there are too
many (the planet is warming, which means the oceans are warming, which means every October day she doesn’t need a sweatshirt
her heart breaks for her aquatic buddies), she walks on the town beach, near the Coast Guard House.
You cannot, of course, see Block Island from Narragansett, the island is too far out to sea, but she imagines that she can.
She thinks about how people there were careless: careless with each other’s hearts, and sometimes with each other’s bodies,
and sometimes with their own bodies, and it ended in tragedy for Shelly, though it could easily have been any of them. It
was just an accident in the dark, nobody knew what happened.
In the course of that year she goes on five dates total: three from Tinder (two terrible, one okay), and two with guys she
met through friends (one okay, one terrible). She understands that this is a pretty small number of dates for a single person
her age, but she’s mostly fine with that.
Fall goes by; the water becomes too cold to put her feet in when she walks on the beach. In December, at the urging of her
boss at Save the Bay, she applies to the Master of Arts in Marine Affairs program at her alma mater, URI.
There’s a four-day period in March when she’s this close to moving back to Minnesota. She misses her family, and she misses her home state. Rhode Island is beautiful, but it’s never been home. Undergrad was so long ago she’s forgotten some of the state’s quirks, and now they seem quirkier than they did before. Milkshakes are called cabinets; water fountains are bubblers; milk comes in coffee flavor? Maybe marine biology isn’t for her after all. March in New England can be dreary: gray-hued skies, streets of dirty melting snow, cold rain, and all of this is harder to swallow without the built-in friends and social life that come effortlessly in college.
She wonders if these last several months have been a fever dream, an overcorrection to the breakup with Zachary. Her sister
Shauna is going to have a baby in May, and could be there for the birth, the first days of the baby’s life. She could
audition for the role of Fun Aunt.
She calls home, to take the temperature of the family. Her mom answers and tells her all about Shauna’s last appointment,
and how Shauna and her husband have known the sex of the baby forever but refuse to tell anyone.
“I wanted to throw them one of those gender reveal parties!” she complains. “I was really deep into my Instagram research.
There was this pinata...” Her voice trails off. “Anyway. Never mind that. What’s going on with you, sweetie?”
“I was thinking of coming home.”
“Great. Yes! Book a flight. We’d love to see you. Long weekend, or could you spare a whole week?”
“No, Mom. I mean home home. I was thinking about really coming home.”
“ Moving home?”
“Well, yeah. I was sort of thinking about that.”
“Hang on, Dad wants to talk to you—”
“I could use someone in the office,” says her dad. “You could start with payroll and paperwork and in no time at all you’d
be running the place.”
Her father has tried to lure each of them into the family business at one point or another. Maybe lure is too strong of a word. Invite. That’s kinder.
(“ Lure is too gentle of a word,” her sister Kristin would say. “ Coerce is closer.”)
“I’m not a brother,” she says. “You’d have to rebrand.”
pictures herself in ten years, wearing, who knows, a long flowered skirt and a pastel button-down. Brow furrowed, pale
from spending all of her time under fluorescent lighting, mildly depressed but too caught up in her routine to notice. She’d
be single, or she’d be married to another Minnesotan, and maybe they’d have kids or maybe they wouldn’t. Any weekend she didn’t
have to work they’d be up at the lake.
Her mom gets on the phone and says, “? I’m taking you off speaker.” There’s a pause, and imagines her moving
from the living room, where she would have been, to the kitchen. “Don’t you dare move home.”
“Okay,” says , taken aback. “I mean, I won’t if you don’t—”
“It’s not that we don’t want you. Of course we want you. We always want you. It’s that you put yourself on a path for a reason. Don’t get off because you got nervous.
? Do you hear me?”
“I hear you,” says . “I hear you.”
Throughout that year, and especially during conversations like this one, thinks about what Juliana said to her when
they sat on her dock that very last night.
I can tell how many different people love you. And: People move differently in the world when they are loved by a lot of people .
In April she’s accepted to the program and given research assistant funding. After she gets her email she holds her phone,
unsure who to call first. Her parents? Reina? One of her sisters? All of them would be happy to hear from her, appropriately
proud and interested.
She looks at her phone, considering, and almost without thinking she’s calling a number she hasn’t used in nine months. She’s
calling one of Forbes ’s wealthiest self-made entrepreneurs. She’s not expecting an answer.
But the call connects almost immediately. “ ? I can’t believe it! How are you?”
She tells her about the acceptance.
“That’s amazing!” says Juliana. “I’m so happy for you! That’s really fantastic, . It’s the perfect thing for you.” All
of this feels sincere to —earned and sincere.
“So how are you ? How’s everything?”
“Good! Busy, you know. But good.” kept up on news about the IPO, one of the biggest of the past few years. The numbers
she read were so big they mean almost nothing to ; Juliana now has unfathomable, untouchable wealth.
After that come several seconds of things they do not say. Juliana does not ask after David. does not ask about Juliana’s
personal life. Neither mentions Block Island or the summer before, Shelly, Great Salt, Jack Baker, any of it.
“Listen, ? I have to go, okay? I have to go.” A pause. “But I’m glad you called. I’m really glad. I think about you
a lot. I really do. And hey—stay in touch, okay?”
“Okay,” says . “Of course. You too.”
“I will,” promises Juliana. But she’d bet that her path and Juliana’s will never cross again. Like a summer romance, like
a sunset, like a snowflake, that’s all in the past now.
People move differently in the world when they are loved by a lot of people . gave Juliana the gift of saving her life, sure. But Juliana gave something too: the gift of understanding
this.
Travis is in the kitchen, making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich before his shift, so she tells him about her acceptance.
“Cool!” says Travis. She watches him spread a layer of potato chips on the peanut butter side, then lay the jelly side on
top, gently pressing down, enough to crack some of the potato chips but not enough to break them in pieces. “I didn’t even
know you were into that stuff.”
rolls her eyes. “Travis. I work at the Save the Bay Exploration Center and Aquarium. I go there three days a week.”
He squints at her. “I thought you worked at Coast Guard House. I thought you knew my buddy Rob who also works at The Tavern with me. Want a sandwich?”
“I also work at Coast Guard House and know your buddy Rob who works at The Tavern with you. But the marine stuff is my passion.”
“Cool,” Travis says again, nodding and chewing. “Passion is good.”
For some reason, it is exactly the thing she needed to hear. She says, “You know what, Travis? I do want a sandwich.”
In May she gives notice to her landlord. A room close to the beach won’t be hard to fill for the summer, and she knows that
when she comes back she wants to live alone, even if it means returning to the Coast Guard House one night a week to help
cover the rent. She says goodbye to Travis, piles four of Maeve’s socks outside Maeve’s bedroom door, and packs up the Subaru
to drive back to Minnesota.
One hot day in August, the doggiest of the dog days of summer, Shauna is napping while and her mom pass Shauna’s newborn,
Jasmine, back and forth between them. They’re in the screened-in porch facing the dock and the lake. Kristin and Kate were
there when Jasmine was born but went back to the Cities for work. A couple of pontoons move lazily, and is alternating
between watching them and marveling at Jasmine. “Look at her eyelashes,” says . “I mean, come on .”
“They’re perfect,” Linda confirms. After a moment she says, “You know, you look pretty natural holding that baby.”
rolls her eyes. “I sweartogod, Mom.”
Jasmine opens the blue saucers she has for eyes and looks at them. She’s the best baby in the world, so calm and quiet, so
serene , so wise, that worries she’s ruining the reputation of babies the world over who will never live up to her example.
It’s actually unfair to all those other babies.
“I just don’t understand,” says ’s mother, “how this calm grandchild came from the least calm daughter.” Her mother says that 76 percent of her gray hairs came from the years Shauna was fifteen, sixteen, and seventeen.
snorts, and when Jasmine looks startled at the way the snort makes ’s arms jump, says, “Sorry, honey,”
and tries to stay very still as Jasmine settles.
“Nature’s correction, I guess,” says Linda. Then the phone rings—their cottage is one of the last places on the planet with
a landline. And they actually answer it!
“I’ll get it,” says Linda. In a minute she comes back and says, “You’ll never believe it. That was David! He’s on his way
here.”
“Our David?”
“Our very own David. And Felicity! Last-minute trip.”
“Who takes a last-minute trip to Minnesota?” Linda shrugs. “No Taylor?” asks .
“He didn’t mention Taylor. Can you do me a favor, Nic? Can you run up to Aldi and get a box of Popsicles for Felicity, and
maybe a bottle of white wine? Do you think you can find something fancy enough for David?”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“About buying it, or about the fancy?”
“The fancy!”
“Yes. I’m kidding about the fancy. But maybe stay away from the four-dollar bottles.”
“I’d stay away from those anyway. I have some standards.” She passes the baby to her mother.
has only talked to David a couple of times since the previous summer. He didn’t come home for Christmas—he and Taylor
and Felicity went to St. Barts with Taylor’s father. knows from her lurking on the website of the Block Island Times and the YouTube channel that plays the planning board meetings that her little cottage has been demolished and construction on a new home is moving forward, and she also knows that the plans for the downtown hotel have been held up in a seemingly endless series of zoning meetings. It might never happen. But, knowing the Buchanans, it probably will.
At Aldi, she finds a decent bottle of Sauvignon Blanc for $22, and a box of organic Popsicles plus one of ice cream sandwiches.
She’s in line behind someone whose twenty-one items definitely exceed the fifteen-item limit (not that she’s counting; okay,
maybe she’s counting), so she picks up one of the magazines on the endcap display and starts to read while she waits.
“You buying that?” looks up, startled, to see that her three items have moved ahead of her on the conveyor belt.
“Sorry.” She closes the magazine and hands it to the clerk. She pays for her things, walks to her car, and drives home.
When she gets back, Felicity is sitting in the screened-in porch with Linda and David, quivering over Jasmine, who is sleeping
like the superstar baby she is. Felicity is now four. She’s a full quarter of her life older than she was a year ago. Her
limbs are longer, and her curls are longer, and some of the baby fat in her cheeks has melted away, revealing a hint of what
she might look like one day, as a teen and then as a young adult.
“Want to walk down to the dock, ?” asks David after they all pass hugs around. “There’s something I want to talk to
you about.”
“That sounds ominous. Is it ominous?” David doesn’t answer.
“Go ahead,” says ’s mother. “Felicity and I will bake come cookies.”
“Really?” asks Felicity. “What kind ?”
“Let’s see what we have. Here, I’ll carry the baby but you’re in charge of her seat, okay?” ’s mom is like this, gracious
and kind to small people; she’ll bake with them or color with them and listen to their stories.
“You want some of this not-terrible wine?” asks David.
“You had me at not-terrible ,” he says.
They pour the wine into two plastic tumblers and walk down to the end of the dock. They dangle their feet over the edge, like
they used to when they were kids and the tumblers were cans of Coke.
“So,” he said. “I have something to tell you about, and I wanted to do it in person.”
“Is this about Juliana again, David? Because I really don’t want to get in—”
He cuts her off. “No, that’s completely over. Taylor and I are making it work. We’re doing great, actually.”
“Yeah? For real?”
“For real. For absolute real. We got something back that we lost, you know? Trust, I guess. Kindness. We got the kindness
back.” He pauses. “It’s something else.” He looks nervous ! David doesn’t get nervous. “I want to tell you something about Jack.”
She shakes her head and takes a big sip of wine. “No, thank you,” she says primly. “I really don’t think about Jack anymore.”
His voice is urgent. “No, but . You have to listen. I have to tell you this story. I’m telling you, okay? So you just
need to listen. Please? Just listen.”
She squints out at the water. “Okay. I’ll listen.”
“Remember when Shelly Salazar died last summer?”
“Of course I remember that. Geez, David. Yeah, how could I forget? She’s like the only person my age I’ve known who’s died,
basically. She washed up not that far from where I lived, you know?” , in fact, thinks about Shelly Salazar a lot , and how fast she went from being the object of ’s ire to, well, to dead. So fast.
“Okay. Sorry! That’s what I want to talk to you about. Shelly—didn’t drown.”
“Huh? Of course she did. Her body washed up on Dinghy Beach. She was drunk and jumped off a boat. Of course she drowned.”
“I mean, she did, of course, drown. But she didn’t just drown.”
feels prickles in her palms. Does a cloud pass in front of the sun? She says, “I’m not sure what you mean.”
“Jack stayed with us for two nights right around Christmas, in Boston, before we went to St. Barts.” (Taylor and David will
return to Block Island in the summers, but their winter residence remains in Boston.)
“Okay?” says .
“The first night he went out, but the second night we ate at home. We drank a lot at dinner, wine, then bourbon, you know
how it goes.”
“I know.”
“Taylor got disgusted with us and went to bed, no shocker, honestly, I don’t blame her, and we just kept pouring more and
more bourbon. I could tell Jack was getting pretty drunk—hell, I was getting pretty drunk too, but he was drinking faster,
more, and when it was pretty late, like maybe eleven, he brought up Shelly. And he told me—”
David clears his throat, pauses, keeps talking.
“He told me that he and Taylor’s friend Michael—do you know Michael? It doesn’t matter. Friend from boarding school.” The
two M s, remembers. “He’s sort of an asshole from my experience of him. Anyway, he told me that that night, the night Shelly
died, he and Michael took the inflatable that was tied up to Johnny O’Neill’s boat and tooled around in Great Salt.”
“They just took an inflatable out? In the middle of a party?”
“The party on the boat was boring, I guess. I don’t know. Stupid reason. Jack thinks everything is boring. Even stupider,
they didn’t use a light. Anyone who knows anything knows that you always use a light at night with an inflatable. Michael was driving. They were out in the middle of the pond,
and Michael, for no reason, apparently, picked up speed. And then...”
has the sense of walls closing in around her, but of course there are no walls. The water is so clear at the edge of the lake, they can see all the way to the bottom. The sun is shining mightily. Far out a pontoon passes, sturdy and proud, and beyond that are the edges of Drumbeater Island. doesn’t want David to keep talking. No , she says, but only in her head.
“And then there was a bump. Like they hit something. But they didn’t have the lights, so they couldn’t see. ‘I thought it
was a buoy, or a mooring ball,’ Jack told me. They went back, tied up the inflatable, went their separate ways. But the whole
time, Jack said, he didn’t think it was a buoy. It didn’t feel like a buoy. It felt like—”
“A person,” says .
“Right. A person.”
“My god,” says . “They didn’t tell anyone? They didn’t tell the police?”
“The day Shelly’s body was found, the police questioned anyone they could find who had been on the boat at the same time as
Shelly. But everyone had been drinking; nobody was tracking who returned to the boat after jumping off. There was nothing
to be done. And Jack’s attitude, that night around Christmas when he told me this, was Shelly was already dead. ‘Don’t get
me wrong, David,’ he said. ‘It’s totally tragic. But what good would it be for Michael to come forward after the fact, if
he doesn’t even know if he hit her?’”
“He definitely hit her,” says .
“That’s what I thought too. But Jack’s whole thing was they didn’t know for sure. And even if they did, what would be the
point of ruining Michael’s life too? And anyway, said Jack, who’s to say she wouldn’t have drowned anyway? ‘That girl was
a total mess, she never should have been swimming. She was wasted.’ That’s what Jack said.”
“What would be the point ?” croaks . “The point is justice. The point is that you can’t just go around killing people and going on with your life
like nothing happened.”
“Well, I know that.” David shakes his head. “I’m telling you what Jack said. But I haven’t told you the rest of it.”
“There’s more ?”
David nods grimly. “In February, Michael and Mo stayed with us on their way up to ski in Vermont. Just for one night. Taylor
wanted some time with Mo so she sent Michael and me to this bar around the corner. I almost couldn’t look at Michael, knowing
he’d done this terrible thing. I really could hardly talk to him, and he could tell. We used to hang out and get along, you
know? I mean, he’s an asshole, but he’s a tolerable asshole, and I’m actually fine with assholes. I’ve known a lot of them.
But like I said, he could tell, and eventually, he asked me what was up. I told him. I said, I know about the accident with
the dinghy. I know what you did, and that you didn’t tell anyone. And he said, What I did? I said, Yeah, Jack told me.”
“Okaaaayy,” says , drawing it out.
“And he said, ‘Oh, Jesus, is that what Jack told you? That I was driving?’” David pauses, and his eyes flick over to . “You maybe see where I’m going
here.”
“I don’t.” Then all at once she does. All at once she understands. Her words ping over the lake. “Jack was driving the inflatable.”
“Jack was driving the inflatable,” says David.
Jack was driving the inflatable.
Two kayaks, far out in the distance, do their thing, and she watches them, not wanting to look at David. “I feel like I’m
going to throw up. David. I wish you hadn’t told me this. Why did you tell me?” She wants to put the story back in the box
it came in, take it to the UPS store to return it.
David is looking at the water too. “Because I know how Jack operates. He’ll pop up in your life someday—that’s how he is.
And I want you to know exactly who he is, so you can stay away. I used to think he was mostly harmless, you know, a playboy,
of course , which we told you before you ever started hanging out with him.”
“Taylor did say that,” agrees .
“But this is a whole other level. This is something I didn’t know he had in him.”
Jack taking all of the turns in David’s car too fast, shirking any responsibility. It takes two to make an accident. Jack beating his fist on his heart. You got me right here. doesn’t know what to do with any of this. Her skin feels too tight on her arms. Her heart is beating uncomfortably.
’s mom is at the far end of the dock now, calling out something about dinner: Will burgers do? That’s all she has on
hand.
They call back to her, using the false happy voices they perfected as teenagers to hide if someone was drunk, or high, or
sneaking out to meet a boyfriend or girlfriend. Burgers will most definitely do. Burgers will be perfect.
“I’m sending Felicity down to you! So you need to watch her on the dock!”
“Got it!” they call back. “Send her down!”
In an instant Felicity is there, smelling like chocolate chip cookies and summer and childhood, demanding to go swimming,
to go in a kayak, to get a yellow Lab puppy like her friend Sophie has. “I want to run up and down the dock,” she says. “Can
I do that? Can I run fast?”
Was it already a year ago that was on a different dock with Juliana, watching the green light go out on her elusive,
impossible dream? Was it only a year ago?
“Tomorrow,” she tells Felicity. “Tomorrow we will do all of that, except no promises about the puppy. Tomorrow, on flat ground,
when we’re not so close to the water, we will run faster.”
Later, when everyone else has gone to sleep, can’t settle. What David told her about Jack is still roiling around in
her head, her stomach, even her heart.
She goes to the bathroom, tiptoeing past the room where Shauna and Jasmine are sleeping and the one where Felicity and David are sleeping. Her mom is down the hall. She fills a glass of water in the kitchen and carries it back to her room. When she’s setting it down she sees that the magazine she bought at the market has slipped onto the floor between the bed and the nightstand. She picks it up and flips through it.
And her breath catches. There’s Juliana. Juliana George, founder of LookBook, takes daughter Daisy for a walk in Malibu, says the caption. Juliana is in sunglasses, her dark hair blowing back from her face, a baby carrier secured to the front
of her body, only the back of an infant’s head visible. Behind Juliana extends a vast stretch of the Pacific. has never
been to Malibu or anywhere near it, but the mere name is evocative: she thinks of rum, and Barbie’s pink vacation house, and
Joan Didion, and movie stars in in their mansions high above the crashing sea.
Juliana’s photo is on a page with six other “celebrity sightings”; no article, no other details, just the photo and the caption.
No mention of a partner. No age listed for the baby, Daisy. stares for a really long time at the photo, trying to read
something into it that’s not there. It’s impossible to read Juliana’s expression. The sunglasses hide everything.